The Foreign Gaze

The field of research known as academic global health is in the midst of a scientific debate that is questioning its epistemological foundations. This book contributes to that questioning. Through a series of essays that weave together personal narratives and conceptual reflections, it shows how as researchers in academic global health, we defer to a distant, powerful, foreign gaze, whose power shapes our pose and what we can see or say. Many of our accepted knowledge practices – how we make, use, share and value knowledge – are steeped in structural prejudice and heavily peppered by epistemic injustice. To transform academic global health, we need a critical mass of people who can articulate why many of our accepted knowledge practices are unfair, people who know where to aim their efforts to entrench just practices, people who can get others to join in those efforts. This book was written to help build that critical mass.